The Heart of The Milky Way - Some 26,000 light years and countless intervening clouds of stars, gas and dust separate Earth from the core of our galaxy. In visible light it is totally hidden from our view behind the bright star clouds of Sagittarius., but orbiting telescopes that observe at other wavelengths can pierce the veil to reveal a strange landscape of twisted dust clouds, violent stars and superhot gas. Right of centre, a blaze of blue and white reveals a huge cluster of heavyweight stars swimming in a sea of hot gas: they mark the exact centre of the Milky Way, orbiting around an invisible supermassive black hole with the mass of 4 million Suns.

The Dunes of Mars - Complex sand patterns ripple across a crater floor in the Noachis Terra region of the Martian southern hemisphere. While the northern regions of Mars are dominated by low rolling plains, the southern hemisphere is more chaotic and heavily cratered. Windblown sand accumulates in the floor of these craters, where it is frequently blown into beautiful dune patterns, some of which are unknown from Earth's deserts and probably owe their unique forms to the tiny size of Martian sand grains.

The Core shares an article from BU Today concerning the intriguing origin of stars, where CAS professor James Jackson answers some exciting questions. A sample:

For years, Jackson, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of astronomy, and his international colleagues studied [a dark, opaque mass that astronomers call] “the brick,” with the most powerful telescopes available and saw only, well, a brick, impenetrable and opaque. That changed last year with the unveiling of a powerful new tool called the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a collection of 66 dish antennae, or radio telescopes, spread across an almost 10-mile stretch of Chile’s high-altitude Atacama Desert. The $1.4 billion project, to be fully functioning by the end of 2013, is three decades in the making and involves astronomers from Europe, North America, Japan, and Australia.

“ALMA’s going to blow the field wide open,” says Jackson, CAS associate dean for research and outreach, who was among the first astronomers to use the array. “We are poised to understand the origins of stars in an unprecedented way and that’s the origin of us.”